Book launch party of "A Day In the Bleachers" by Arnold Hano(right) (about Willie Mays' 1954 catch at the Polo Grounds) in a special hand-madde edition of the going at $700 dollars a piece. Illustrations are by Mark Ulriksen(left). less

Book launch party of "A Day In the Bleachers" by Arnold Hano(right) (about Willie Mays' 1954 catch at the Polo Grounds) in a special hand-madde edition of the going at $700 dollars a piece. Illustrations are ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

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Mark Ulriksen's painting a Giant among Giants

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It is a rainy Sunday morning and Mark Ulriksen is working on a bottle of Mumm sparkling wine. He lifts the bottle, studies the label and, with his other hand, lifts his brush to the upper left side of a painting of the San Francisco Giants on their home field.

The bottle of bubbly will replace the bottle of Coke as the final and most obvious touch in Ulriksen's tribute to the champions of Major League Baseball. The canvas is 4 feet by 5 feet, which is a dramatic departure for Ulriksen, whose standard painting fits on a magazine cover. He's done 37 for the New Yorker alone.

"These are the guys who will go down in history as the first world champions from San Francisco," says Ulriksen, while looking at a picture of the Coke bottle he has taped to the canvas, in order to accurately depict the ridges.

He has already put 300 hours into this noncommissioned work and is up against a deadline. That's because he has arranged to have it unveiled in Scottsdale, Ariz., this weekend at Don & Charlie's steak house, which he's heard is the hub for the Giants during Spring Training.

Anyone who walks into Don & Charlie's will see the deep blue sky and the bright green field that are the dominant hues in "Your 2010 World Champion San Francisco Giants." It is an action painting, and all nine starters are in it, which means eight baseballs are in play. Pitcher Tim Lincecum and catcher Buster Posey share one ball and everyone else is either fielding or throwing in Ulriksen's unique sporting style, which he's heard described as "graceful awkwardness."

Two of the players depicted, third baseman Juan Uribe and shortstop Edgar Renteria, have decamped for the Dodgers and the Reds. There was temptation to sub them out for current players. Maybe replace Uribe at third with the popular Panda (Pablo Sandoval), who would be more fun to draw.

Also fun would have been to trick up the painting by having Tony Bennett sing and put various team dignitaries and celebrity fans in the stands.

Ulriksen resisted because he didn't want to crowd the painting with detail. As it is, the players' faces and uniforms are precise, from the patches on the shoulders to the stripes on the hockey-goalie's helmet that Posey wears.

Ulriksen is so detail driven that he studied the make and model of glove that each player uses, to create an exact rendering, and built clay figurines so he could get the shadows right. It took him two days to properly paint the names of the opposing fielders on the out-of-town scoreboard and a day to dot in the spectators.

"I got a stiff neck from doing that," he says in his cramped studio, a reclaimed upstairs kitchen at his home in Cole Valley. There isn't room for him to step back and examine his work, so at the end of each day, he picks up the canvas and shimmies it down the stairway to his living room so he can get some perspective on it.

The next morning, he shimmies it back up, barely making the turn. This had been going on for six months, between paid assignments, by the time he got to the bottle of Mumm.

The cork has been popped off and is headed for the big glove. To get that right takes all day. "It's like watching paint dry," he says, hazarding a quip.

The painting is now finished, but Ulriksen lacks a vehicle large enough to transport it, so he had to borrow a van. The artwork will be packed in a box built by his wife, Leslie Flores, a photographer "who suffers from craftwork ADD," he says.

It will cost about $1,000 to ship it to Arizona and back, so Ulriksen cannot afford to escort it. Asked where he would like to see it hang permanently, he says, "Brian Wilson's living room."

But wait, you can't have two pitchers so the Beard is not on the field. Look closer and there he is, up on the big screen, arms in a cross, mouth open wide and Mohawk standing up. "I wanted to show the different hair colors and make him look deranged," Ulriksen says, appealing to Wilson's carefully cultivated image

The scoreboard clock above him is the one aspect that Ulriksen drew as a riddle. It reads 7:54 p.m. Ulriksen converted that to military time: 19:54 hours.